Introduction - Online Health and Safety for Children and Youth: Best Practices for Families and Guidance for Industry
Helping Kids Thrive Online: Health, Safety, & Privacy
Young people today are surrounded by digital technology and have grown up regularly engaging with social media and online platforms through computers, smartphones, and other electronic devices. Research indicates that approximately 95% of teenagers and 40% of children between the ages of eight and 12 years use some form of social media.1 2 3 Due to the widespread use of social media and online platforms among youth, it is critical to examine the scope of their impact and to cultivate safe and healthy online spaces that help promote overall well-being. This is particularly important given the youth mental health crisis in the United States.4
Digital technology use has the potential to both benefit young people’s well-being and to expose them to significant harms. The use of social media and digital technology can provide opportunities for self-directed learning, forming community, and reducing isolation.5 6 This can be especially important for youth who are marginalized or experiencing mental distress.7 8 9 10 Despite these benefits, social media use has been associated with harms to physical and mental health,11 12 13 including through exposure to bullying, online harassment, and child sexual exploitation.14 15
For example, a 2022 survey of teens found that about half experienced some form of cyberbullying, including being harassed and being sent explicit images that they did not request.16 And adolescents who seek out information about health and safety topics online risk encountering inaccurate information that can be unhelpful or actively dangerous.17
Recognizing the importance of addressing this complex issue, the Biden-Harris Administration announced on May 23, 2023, the creation of an interagency Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety.18 The Administration is committed to efforts to strengthen protections for children’s health, safety, and privacy online, and has called for bipartisan legislative action.19 This Task Force builds on prior work on kids’ online health and safety across the federal government, including the 2023 U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, and recommendations from the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse.20 21
Over the past year, members of the Task Force have worked to prioritize options and identify best practices for supporting youth and their families who have experienced—or are at risk of experienc ing—adverse health effects and harm associated with online platforms. This report highlights those efforts and identifies knowledge gaps where further work is needed.
This report summarizes the evidence on young people’s use of online platforms and the risks and benefits to their health, safety, and privacy. Based on the identified challenges to youth health, safe ty, and privacy, the report includes guidance on the following topics to help accomplish the goals of supporting youth and their families:
- Best Practices and Resources for Parents and Caregivers:
- Overarching framework for children and youth media use.
- Strategies for parents and caregivers.
- Handouts and conversation starters to help parents and caregivers engage their children in conversations about online platforms and technology use.
- A searchable compendium of a set of widely endorsed best practices for parents and caregivers.
- A Set of Recommended Practices for Industry, which provides tools and interventions that the Task Force suggests industry implement to improve kids’ health, safety, and privacy on online platforms. This includes guidance on ways to:
- Design age-appropriate experiences for youth users.
- Make privacy protections for youth the default.
- Reduce and remove features that encourage excessive or problematic use by youth.
- Limit “likes” and social comparison features for youth by default.
- Develop and deploy mechanisms and strategies to counter child sexual exploitation and abuse.
- Disclose accurate and comprehensive safety-related information about apps.
- Improve systems to address bias and discrimination that youth experience online.
- Use data-driven methods to detect and prevent cyberbullying and other forms of online harassment and abuse.
- Provide age-appropriate parental control tools that are easy to understand and use.
- Make data accessible for verified, qualified, and independent research.
A Research Agenda that advances youth well-being through the following domain-specific priorities:
Health- Multidisciplinary research focuses on a holistic view of youth well-being.
- Lifespan perspective with comparisons across different age groups.
- Longitudinal studies.
- Data-informed theories and conceptual models.
- Core components of technology.
- Emerging technologies.
- The impact of varying levels of exposure.
Safety
- Prevalence studies regarding youth experiencing harms online.
- Clinical research when and under what circumstances exposure to problematic content potentially results in harm and long-term impacts.
- Evaluation research on existing programs to address online safety.
- Experimental designs randomizing types of safety messages and prevention programming.
- Contextual factors that increase risk for and fortification against youth online exploitation and abuse.
- Best practices to prevent child sexual exploitation online.
Privacy
- Risk profile over course of childhood development.
- Policy and practice standards on children’s online usage and health.
- Long-term and systemic risks of privacy considerations.
- Efficacy and effectiveness of privacy protections for children.
- Effects of the pandemic, including ubiquitous computer use in schools.
The report concludes with a section outlining next steps for policymakers, including:
- Enacting federal legislation to protect youth health, safety, and privacy online.
- Advancing industry action to implement age-appropriate health, safety and privacy best practices on online platforms through federal legislation and voluntary commitments.
- Working to require access to platform data for independent researchers in privacy-preserving ways.
- Providing support for research into youth health, safety, and privacy online.
- Promoting youth voices in solution settings.
- Supporting access to new and updated resources tailored for youth, parents, health providers, and educators.
- Engaging in international efforts to collaborate on online safety.
Ensuring the online health, safety and well-being of young people in the United States is a critical public health priority. Today’s youth are more digitally literate than any previous generation, which creates both risks and benefits of online technology. The strategies described in this report aim to help protect the health, safety, and privacy of youth online, but it will take a whole-of-government approach in collaboration with researchers, industry, civil society, youth, and others to achieve this.
Task Force Membership
The Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force is comprised of several agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Commerce (DOC), the Department of Education (ED), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Executive Office of the President and a representative from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Task Force Principals
Co-Chairs
Assistant Secretary for
Mental Health and Substance Use
Administrator, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information
Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)
Members
Human Services
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary
performing the delegable duties of
the Assistant Secretary for Children
and Families Administration for
Children and Families (ACF)
VADM Vivek Murthy
U.S. Surgeon General
Office of the Surgeon General (OSG)
ADM Rachel Levine
Assistant Secretary for Health Office
of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH)
Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Director
for Program and Science
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Monica Bertangolli
Director of National Institutes of Health
(NIH)
Department of Commerce
Director of National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Assistant Secretary Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development
Commissioner
Homeland Security
Assistant Secretary Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention and Law Enforcement
Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans
Chief Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section
Senior Advisor
Gender Policy Council
Director
National Security Council
Jonathan Donenberg
Deputy Assistant to the President
for Economic Policy
National Economic Council
Deirdre K. Mulligan
Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
Vivek Viswanathan
Senior Advisor White House
Office of Deputy Chief of Staff
Special Assistant to the President for Veteran Affairs
Domestic Policy Council
Chris Fisk
Senior Policy Advisor
Office of the Vice President
Patricia J. Liu
Deputy Policy Director
Office of the First Lady
1 C. Carr, and R. Hayes, "Social Media: Defining, Developing, and Divining." Atlantic Journal of Communication, (2015): 23:1, 46-65.
2 See also Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital that estimated youth use based on market research data and public sources: A. Raffoul, Z. Ward, M. Santoso, J. Kavanaugh, and S. Austin, "Social media platforms generate billions of dollars in revenue from U.S. youth: Findings from a simulated revenue model." (2023): PLoS ONE 18(12): e0295337.
3 Office of the Surgeon General (OSG). Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. (2023)
4 Office of the Surgeon General (OSG). Protecting Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. (2021)
5 A. Giovanelli, E. Ozer, and R. Dahl, "Leveraging technology to improve health in adolescence: A developmental science perspective," Journal of Adolescent Health, (2023): 67(2).
6 J. Nesi, S. Choukas-Bradley, and M. Prinstein, "Transformation of adolescent peer relations in the social media context: Part 1—A theoretical framework and application to dyadic peer relationships." Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review (2018): 21, 267-294.
7 M. Álvarez-Jiménez, J. Gleeson, S. Rice, C. Gonzalez-Blanch, and S. Bendall, "Online peer-to-peer support in youth mental health: seizing the opportunity." Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences (2016): 25(2), 123-126.
8 F. Angelini, C. Marino, and G. Gini, "Friendship quality in adolescence: the role of social media features, online social support and e-motions." Current Psychology (2023): 42(30), 26016-26032.
9 J. Nagata, H. Abdel Magid, and K. Gabriel, "Screen Time for children and adolescents during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic." Obesity (2020): 28(9), 1582–1583.
10 J. Naslund, K. Aschbrenner, L. Marsch, and S. Bartels, "The future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media." Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, (2016): 25(2), 113-122.
11 J. Nesi, T. Burke, A. Bettis, A. Kudinova, E. Thompson, H. MacPherson, and R. Liu, "Social media use and self-injurious thoughts and behaviors: A systematic review and meta-analysis." Clinical Psychology Review (2021): 87, 102038.
12 K. Riehm, K. Feder, K. Tormohlen, R. Crum, A. Young, K. Green, and R. Mojtabai, "Associations between time spent using social media and internalizing and externalizing problems among US youth." JAMA Psychiatry (2019): 76(12), 1266-1273.
13 J. Twenge, T. Joiner, M. Rogers, and G. Martin, "Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among US adolescents after 2010 and links to increased new media screen time." Clinical Psychological Science (2018): 6(1), 3-17.
14 M. Gámez‐Guadix, E. Mateos‐Pérez, S. Wachs, M. Wright, J. Martínez, and D. Íncera, "Assessing imagebased sexual abuse: Measurement, prevalence, and temporal stability of sextortion and nonconsensual sexting (“revenge porn”) among adolescents. Journal of Adolescence (2022): 94(5), 789-799.
15 B. Sciacca, A. Mazzone, M. Loftsson, J. O’Higgins Norman, and M. Foody, "Nonconsensual dissemination of sexual images among adolescents: associations with depression and self-esteem." Journal of Interpersonal Violence, (2023): 38(15-16), 9438-9464.
16 E. Vogels, Pew Research Center, “Teens and Cyberbullying 2022” (December 2022).
17 K. Greškovičová et al. "Superlatives, clickbaits, appeals to authority, poor grammar, or boldface: Is editorial style related to the credibility of online health messages?" Front. Psychol., (August 2022): Sec. Health Psychology Volume 13 - 2022.
18 The White House "FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Announces Actions to Protect Youth Mental Health, Safety & Privacy" (May 23, 2023).
19 The White House "Readout of White House Listening Session on Tech Platform Accountability" (Sept. 08, 2022).
20 Office of the Surgeon General (OSG). "Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory." (2023)
21 White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, "Final Report and Blueprint" (May 2024).
22 Congressional Research Service "Defining and Regulating Online Platforms" (Aug. 25, 2023).
23 OECD "An Introduction to Online Platforms and Their Role in the Digital Transformation" (2019).